Posted
by
timothyon Sunday August 02, 2015 @08:33AM
from the in-the-pipeline dept.

Reuters reports that four people have died of Legionnaire's Disease in an outbreak in the Bronx, and 65 more have exhibited symptoms of the disease. The Bronx was also home to the most recent flare-up of the disease, in December of last year. Says the article,
In response to the outbreak, the city's health department has inspected 22 buildings in the Bronx, 17 of which have cooling towers. Five buildings, including the historic Opera House Hotel, Lincoln Medical Center and the Concourse Plaza mall and movie complex, tested positive for Legionella. Disinfection efforts are ongoing or have already been completed at all five sites. ... The people who died from the disease were older adults with underlying medical problems, according to a city press release. The department said the city's drinking water supply, fountains and pools have not been affected.

Posted
by
timothyon Sunday August 02, 2015 @05:30AM
from the and-some-others-while-you're-at-it dept.

sciencehabit writes: A simple supplement to a cow's feed could substantially decrease a major source of methane, a planet-warming greenhouse gas, a new study suggests. Each year worldwide, the methane produced by cud-chewing livestock warms Earth's climate by the same amount as 2.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide, a little more than 4% of the greenhouse gas emissions related to human activity. That makes cows tempting targets for methane reduction efforts. In a new study, researchers added the chemical 3-nitrooxypropanol, also known as 3NOP, to the corn-and-alfalfa-based feed of 84 milk-producing Holsteins and monitored their methane production for 12 weeks—the largest and longest such trial of its type in lactating cows, the scientists say. For cows whose feed included 3NOP, methane emissions dropped, on average, by 30%.

sciencehabit writes: A simple supplement to a cow’s feed could substantially decrease a major source of methane, a planet-warming greenhouse gas, a new study suggests. Each year worldwide, the methane produced by cud-chewing livestock warms Earth’s climate by the same amount as 2.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide, a little more than 4% of the greenhouse gas emissions related to human activity. That makes cows tempting targets for methane reduction efforts. In a new study, researchers added the chemical 3-nitrooxypropanol, also known as 3NOP, to the corn-and-alfalfa-based feed of 84 milk-producing Holsteins and monitored their methane production for 12 weeks—the largest and longest such trial of its type in lactating cows, the scientists say. For cows whose feed included 3NOP, methane emissions dropped, on average, by 30%.Link to Original Source

AmiMoJo writes: A new preliminary proposal submitted to the Unicode Consortium suggests that specific emoji for food allergies should be added to the standard. The proposal (PDF), submitted by a Google engineer, is under discussion and may not be added to the standard at all but offers a peek into some useful new emoji. It suggests the addition of peanuts, soybeans, buckwheat, sesame seeds, kiwi fruit, celery, lupin beans, mustard, tree nuts, eggs, milk products and gluten to help those with allergies express them in shorthand.

StarTrekCafe writes: hi. can blind people use accessible modelling tools for visual studio? probably not! as screen readers cannot read text inside images or graphics or diagrams. so i need to do a modelling project for my programming course via http://www.upskilled.edu.au./ I use a screen reader Jaws For Windows from http://www.freedomscientific.c... Now, what are my options. Did try plant uml, but that is java based. So any ideas, need to do state, use, case, class and sequence diagrams from a couple of projects i have done already. A C# and a SQL Database project. Will ryno 3d do the job with accessibility? So what accessible tools, can i use? need to convey this information to my lectuer. Will it read the content in visual studio 2013 or 2015?Link to Original Source

Posted
by
timothyon Sunday August 02, 2015 @02:26AM
from the so-use-amazon-prime dept.

Hallie Siegel writes: A team of researchers from ETH Zurich have just set a new endurance record for solar powered flight of an unmanned autonomous aircraft, achieving over four days of solar-powered flight in a range of weather conditions. Being able to demonstrate more than 24 hours of endurance is important because overcast skies can inhibit recharging and poor weather or high winds can effect power consumption. Nice achievement for this class of aircraft.

Posted
by
timothyon Saturday August 01, 2015 @11:21PM
from the me-tizen dept.

New submitter Manish Singh writes: Why is Samsung, the South Korean technology conglomerate which has the tentpole position in Android, becoming increasinglu focused on its homegrown operating system Tizen? At its annual developer summit this week, the company announced new SDKs for smartwatches, smart TVs, and smartphones, and also shared its future roadmap.

Manish Singh writes: Why is Samsung, the South Korean technology conglomerate which has the tentpole position in Android becoming increasing focused on its homegrown operating system Tizen? At its annual developer summit this week, the company announces new SDKs for smartwatches, smart TVs, and smartphones and also shares its future roadmap.Link to Original Source

schwit1 writes: Five men with complete motor paralysis have regained the ability to move their legs voluntarily and produce step-like movements after being treated with a non-invasive form of spinal cord stimulation. The new treatment builds on prior work to generate voluntary movements in paralyzed people through electrical stimulation â" in particular, two studies (one completed in 2011, the other in 2014) that involved surgically implanting an electrode array on the spinal cord. This time, however, the researchers found success without performing any invasive surgery.

The new treatment uses a technique called transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, which involves strategically placing electrodes on the skin of the lower back. While receiving stimulation, the men's legs were supported by braces that hung from the ceiling. At first their legs only moved involuntarily, if at all. But they soon found they could voluntarily extend the distance their legs moved during stimulation. They doubled their range of voluntary motion after four treatment sessions.Link to Original Source

An upgrade to FireChat released today could make the app much more useful and powerful. It makes it possible to communicate with other FireChat users beyond the roughly 70 meters that your device can reach with Wi-Fi. Private and public messages can now travel longer distances by hopping between FireChat users until they get to the intended recipient-an approach known as mesh networking. Messages are encrypted as they travel through intermediate devices.Link to Original Source

Posted
by
timothyon Saturday August 01, 2015 @08:14PM
from the where-are-the-other-three? dept.

Reader chicksdaddy reports that a data breach involving four million patients and more than 230 different data holders (from private practices to large hospitals) hit Indiana especially hard. It's the home state of Medical Informatics Engineering, maker of electronic records system NoMoreClipBoard. While data exposed in the breach affected 3.9 million people, 1.5 millon of them are in Indiana.
According to the Security Ledger, though:
[The] breach affects healthcare organizations from across the country, with healthcare providers ranging from prominent hospitals to individual physicians' offices and clinics are among 195 customers of the NoMoreClipboard product that had patient information exposed in the breach. And, more than a month after the breach was discovered, some healthcare organizations whose patients were affected are still waiting for data from EMI on how many and which patients had information exposed.

'We have received no information from MIE regarding that,' said a spokeswoman for Fort Wayne Radiology Association (http://www.fwradiology.com/), one of hundreds of healthcare organizations whose information was compromised in the attack on MIE..

chicksdaddy writes: Four million patients of more than 230 hospitals, doctors offices and clinics had patient data exposed in a May hack of the Fort Wayne, Indiana firm Medical Informatics Engineering (MIE), which makes the NoMoreClipBoard electronic health records system, according to the Indiana Attorney General.(http://goo.gl/KdCbRX) The breach affected 3.9 million people. But it hit MIE's home state of Indiana especially hard. In all, 1.5 million Hoosiers had data exposed in the hack, almost a quarter of the state's population, the Security Ledger reports. (https://securityledger.com/2015/07/doctors-still-in-the-dark-after-electronics-records-hack-exposes-data-on-4-million/)

But the breach affects healthcare organizations from across the country, with healthcare providers ranging from prominent hospitals to individual physicians’ offices and clinics are among 195 customers of the NoMoreClipboard product that had patient information exposed in the breach. And, more than a month after the breach was discovered, some healthcare organizations whose patients were affected are still waiting for data from EMI on how many and which patients had information exposed.

“We have received no information from MIE regarding that,” said a spokeswoman for Fort Wayne Radiology Association (http://www.fwradiology.com/), one of hundreds of healthcare organizations whose information was compromised in the attack on MIE.

According to MIE’s statement, released on July 24, individuals who received services from Fort Wayne Radiology Association and a variety of other imaging and MRI centers were also compromised when a database relating to the healthcare providers was breached in the incident, MIE said. That contained data going back more 17 years and involved another 44 healthcare organizations in three states: Indiana, Ohio and Michigan.Link to Original Source

Posted
by
timothyon Saturday August 01, 2015 @07:02PM
from the afraid-I-can't-do-that-elon dept.

Lasrick points out a rebuttal by Stanford's Edward Moore Geist of claims that have led the recent panic over superintelligent machines. From the linked piece: Superintelligence is propounding a solution that will not work to a problem that probably does not exist, but Bostrom and Musk are right that now is the time to take the ethical and policy implications of artificial intelligence seriously. The extraordinary claim that machines can become so intelligent as to gain demonic powers requires extraordinary evidence, particularly since artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have struggled to create machines that show much evidence of intelligence at all.